2006

This year’s Freedom to Creativity festival is underway in Zagreb, Croatia, featuring a lecture by John Wilbanks of Science Commons on “The Impact of Patents and Licensing on the Commons” and free culture performances by artists from Croatia and Serbia and Montenegro.

Soundclick doesn’t offer CC-specific search or feeds, which rather points out an opportunity for aggregators.

Forunately Google and Yahoo! have both indexed the Soundclick site rather well. Click on one of the previous links or type site:soundclick.com into the search form on the CC find page, which allows you to search Soundclick using Google or Yahoo!’s CC-enabled search.

Last summer, Creative Commons had the pleasure of having Fred Benenson as its first Free Culture intern. Fred was tasked with coming up with interesting or cool ways to get out Creative Commons’ message but on a grass roots level.

Fred created a very sexy media kit that Free Culture members can give to bands at shows or events. The kit includes a flyer explaing CC, a DVD with CC cartoons and videos, and a CD with re-mixed CC licensed music. Our new graphic designer Alex Roberts put on the finishing touches to make it come to life. Nelson Pavlosky, Free Culture’s founder, gave out his first one at a World Inferno Friendship Society show
in Haverford. Nelson reports that the band was friendly to his CC pitch. Thanks for the grass roots efforts.

Markets for semantic technology products and services will grow 10-fold from 2006 to 2010 to more than $50B worldwide. Near-term drivers include 2-10X gains in performance for information-intensive processes across a broad range of applications and domains. From 2010 to 2020 semantic technology markets will grow ten-fold again, fueling trillion-dollar world-wide economic expansions. Longer-term drivers are new capabilities for knowledge-intensive activities, tasks, and processes that will tap new sources of value, delivering performance gains up to 100-fold.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it with Giving it Away (for Fun and Profit), Business 2.0’s article claiming Creative Commons could be the key to a new multibillion-dollar industry. Ponder what would happen if you mashed up these nascent multibillion-dollar industries? Fortunately some of the forward thinkers who started Creative Commons already thought of that.

I want to especially draw attention to our technology challenges page. If you’re a developer looking to help CC with your coding skills this is a good place to look, and will get much better soon, updates to be posted here.

Non-developers may want to check out the content curators page on the wiki. Web communities that encourage CC licensing of user generated audio, video, text, images, and more are popping up all over the world to the extent that we can’t keep track. Please add to this page.

Potential contributors do take note — the CC wiki requires registration with a valid email address, which must be confirmed, as one of several spam prevention mechanisms installed. Sorry for the inconvenience.

We’ve wanted to relaunch the CC wiki for awhile, but the particulars took some inspriation from the Mono Project, Hula Project and others who have built wiki-based sites that look great. We’re happy to be part of this trend.

CC designer Alex Roberts is immediately responsible for the CC wiki’s design and software engineer Nathan Yergler for the coding, standing on the shoulders of giants.

Although the CC Malaysia project was only launched in December 2005 and the Malaysian version of the CC licenses are slated for release in early March 2006, under the stewardship of project lead Dr. Ng Alina, the CC concept has received some welcome initial support in Malaysia. Several musicians have explained how Creative Commons licensing can assist both with the development of the local music scene and also assist musicians to embrace, for their own benefit, the sharing of music by their fans.

“Creative Commons is one of the tools that local musicians can use to protect their works. But it’s just a form of licensing; how you create your music, how you market yourself, how you help create a better, more diverse scene, and how you help others will be the things that make a difference to the local music scene.”

Yu Ri also observed that fighting music piracy should take a more flexible approach than merely combating copyright violations. “I feel it’s not quite about ‘fighting piracy,’ it’s about working with it. People share music. You can’t help that. It’s like fighting a forest fire that keeps on coming and no one really wins.”

Oh, and if you are a Malaysian citizen 17 years or older, check out the CC Malaysia project team’s competition.

Monday evening I had the pleasure of presenting to the Purdue Linux User Group (PLUG) and Purdue Computing Society in West Lafayette, Indiana. Unlike previous talks I’ve done, this one wasn’t about a specific development I’m working on, but rather an overview of CC and metadata. In particular we had a good discussion about the need for relevant, accurate metadata, and the intersection points between embedded metadata and applications. As is typical in my experience, things were the most interesting when there were questions and a dialog about what’s going on, but if you’re interested, my slides are available online. Overall it was a lot of fun, and good to see a group of students really interested in Creative Commons and the work we do.

Cool new global video contest from a community media center in Lowell, Massachusetts: the 100 Second Festival. The deadline for entry is May 1. Entries must be CC licensed and are available for download with Bittorrent. The winners will be screened in Lowell this summer.

BSWC is a weekly program, so there have already been two additional shows this year. The most recent show (playlist) is particularly excellent. It’s really cool to see CC music programs feeding off each other:

Many thanks to Grant
Robertson and his new project, CC365.
CC365 is providing a real service to both the musicians and fans of the
CC music community. This program features three songs from his second
week. I have two computers subscribed to his feed. Check it out…there
are 350 tunes left in 2006.